Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, reported that although Tennessee’s school choice program is widely viewed by schools as a success, a new Comptroller of the Treasury report indicates the program is being undermined by poorly designed management software.
On Monday, a report released by the Comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability on the progress and limitations of the Education Savings Account program created by the General Assembly in 2019 found several potential shortcomings related to the product offered by Student First Technologies (SFT), the School Choice Management Software tapped for Tennessee’s school choice programs.
Pappert emphasized that the Comptroller’s report focuses specifically on the original school choice pilot program in Davidson, Knox, and Shelby counties serving about 6,000 students and not the new Education Freedom Scholarship program created for all of Tennessee’s 95 counties last year.
However, Pappert noted how both programs use the same management software as the state expanded its contract with SFT so the same platform now manages the statewide universal school choice program serving 20,000 students.
“What this Comptroller report found, essentially. is that everybody loves the program. The parents are overjoyed. The teachers and school leaders are happy that they can provide these additional educational offerings to the students, but everybody seems to be unified in their annoyance or frustration with the online platform that’s this multimillion dollar tool Tennessee went with one called Student First Technologies,” Pappert explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
The main takeaway from the report, according to Pappert, is near-universal dissatisfaction with SFT’s online portal as parents often cannot figure out how to use it properly, forcing schools to create their own “how-to” manuals just so families can access and direct funds correctly.
“The takeaway from this report is that parents were unable to understand what they were supposed to put into this platform that resulted in district leaders, school leaders having to create how-to manuals so they could make sure that their children got the grant money they were supposed to get and that it went to the place that it was supposed to go to,” he explained.
Pappert also highlighted the report’s finding that, while the software technically meets statutory data requirements, it fails to collect important information such as student withdrawal data.
“One red flag that was raised is, while this is meeting all of the statutory requirements that the state of Tennessee needs to have in terms of data gathering for these students, it doesn’t seem to be enough. It meets the law, but it doesn’t meet the utility requirements of the teachers, the school leaders, the parents, where, for example, the withdrawal numbers are missing,” he said.
Pappert further noted that schools received limited support from the Tennessee Department of Education after the state purchased the system, leaving educators to troubleshoot problems on their own.
He cautioned that these shortcomings are especially concerning as Tennessee prepares to expand and potentially rebid its school choice software contract in 2026.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
